The invention relates generally to providing real-time communications service to a user by a service provider. In particular, the invention relates to a method and system for providing real-time communications service to a user by a service provider in collaboration with a communications service provider.
Service providers, as the name suggests, provide various services to their subscribers. Examples of service providers include, but are not limited to, a healthcare provider, a financial services provider, an internet service provider and so forth. Typically, a user has to subscribe to a service provider to avail the services offered by the service provider. Once the user registers himself with the service provider, the user can avail the services of the service provider. Over the years, service providers have been trying to provide more and more value-added services to their subscribers.
An example of a service that a healthcare service provider may want to provide to its users is a remote healthcare service. Such a service may enable the user to avail healthcare services remotely while sitting at home. In the current scenario, the healthcare provider can provide such a service to its users as long as the healthcare provider has broadband connectivity and its users have the same. However, such an arrangement will have at least the following limitation: to provide such a service, the healthcare provider will have to incur capital and operational expenses. The capital expense would come from the bank of high-end application servers, video servers, and expensive networking equipment. The operational expense would come from high-bandwidth leased lines, running a full-fledged IT service to maintain the networking infrastructure and the servers, keeping them operational 24X7, and employing highly skilled personnel who would be responsible for maintaining and managing sophisticated multimedia communications system for setting up multiparty connections between the desired parties.
It can be seen that having such an arrangement does not make economic sense for the healthcare provider to incur all these expenses associated with managing a complex communications infrastructure since managing communications infrastructure is not its competency.
On the other hand, managing communications infrastructure is the core competency of a communications service provider. As is known, a communications service provider provides telecommunication services to its subscribers. Recently, communications service providers have started video and mobile services, in addition to voice and data services. The subscribers of such a communications service provider could be both: other service providers, such as the service providers mentioned earlier, and end users. In order to stay competitive and realize the full potential of the communications infrastructure, the communications service providers need to provide value-added services to their users, especially other service providers. These other service providers, in turn, should be able to utilize these value-added services in offering novel services to their users.
Thus, there is a need for a method and a system that will enable the communications service provider to provide various value-added services to service providers. Further, the method and system should also enable the service providers to provide novel services to their users without incurring any additional capital and operational expenses.